Micron Launches New Flagship NVMe Solid-State Storage Family

Described as offering innovative architecture and industry leading performance, the new line is designed to allow organisations to access data faster and stay one step ahead of the growing diversity of business-critical workloads and surging data demands.

The new Micron 9200 SSD combines the cost-effective capacity of 3D NAND with the proven throughput and response time of the NVM Express (NVMe) protocol.

Built from the ground up to remove legacy layers of hard drive interfaces, Micron’s second generation of NVMe drives have been created to unleash the speed of solid state non-volatile memory to maximise data centre efficiency for optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).

“The Micron 9200 Series of NVMe SSDs are specially designed to deliver the blazing fast speeds, low-latency, and high-capacity needed to handle massive files, images and multimedia assets created by today’s complex application workloads,” says Eric Endebrock, vice president SSD and Systems, Storage Business Unit, Micron Technology, Inc. “With the Micron 9200 SSDs added to our SSD playbook, we are providing customers a rich portfolio of storage solutions to manage their changing business needs.”

Extra Capacity

The capacity and performance of Micron 9200 SSDs enables data centres to store more, do more and know more about their data. The architecture combines more NVMe protocols on a PCIe connection, enabling the Micron 9200 SSD to deliver fast enterprise flash performance, the maker says this can be up to 10X faster than the typical SATA SSDs on the market, while also conserving power and rack space with its 3D NAND high-density storage.

The Micron 9200 is also one of the first NVMe SSDs on the market with a capacity exceeding 10TB, meeting the needs of very storage-hungry use cases at an attractive cost per gigabyte.

Matt Kimball, senior analyst, Servers and Storage for Moor Insights & Strategy, says: “NVMe reduces I/O overhead by extending the number of simultaneous storage commands that a single drive can execute. “What has slowed its market acceptance has been the price point and reliability of the technology. Technologies like those from Micron show promise in removing those barriers, which would be a significant step forward in reducing I/O latency for memory intensive workloads.”

Meet Workloads Head On

Micron Technology argues that today’s business is becoming ever more complicated, requiring faster decision-making and analysis of ever-larger data sets to remain competitive. As a result, the company says there is a growing emphasis on denser data centres, ensuring reliability and data persistence, and scaling storage infrastructure up and out without adding latency.

For those organisations with high-capacity and high-performance data needs, solid-state storage technologies like 3D NAND and NVM Express are designed to provide the technology foundation for next-level enterprise IT.

The maker argues its Micron 9200 SSDs are ideal for such high-performance, high-capacity use cases as application/ database acceleration, OLTP, high frequency trading (HFT), and high performance computing (HPC).

For example, when compared against the nearest competitor in terms of capacity and performance in an OLTP database workload, the Micron 11TB 9200 ECO SSD, was said to be 45% faster and had more than twice the capacity.

The Micron 9200 SSD family is designed as the storage foundation for the Micron SolidScale platform, providing greater capacity for more efficient workload optimisation and reducing TCO.

With the 9200, SolidScale will be capable of over 250TB per node, scaling over 5PB per rack of the highest performance NVMe SSD available in shared storage today. These new high-performance NVMe have been created to accelerate applications and breathe new life and agility into aging infrastructures, delivering key capabilities for today’s enterprise.